Study: Oslo and Stockholm lead Europe in music taste

Network analysis of how music spreads from city to city has yielded
evidence that Oslo and Stockholm are the first to discover new
bands, and the first to dump them.

"We find empirical support for the claim that a leadership
network exists among cities," reads a paper (PDF) describing
the research, authored by Conrad Lee and Pádraig
Cunningham from University College Dublin. "Some cities are
consistently early adopters of new music (and early to snub stale
music)."

Lee and Cunningham took data from Last.fm known as "
scrobbles", which register when a person plays a song, matching
it with their geographical location. It then publishes lists of the
most listened-to artists, divided geographically. The way those
charts vary over time can show which cities are leaders, and which
are followers.

The pair took chart information from Last.fm dating
back three years for 200 cities around the world, numbering
billions of points of data. They cleaned it up to remove noise from
cities which, for example, might have only had a few people
submitting data. They then adapted a method previously used
to detect the leadership networks present in flocks of birds to
work out whether a similar leadership network exists among cities,
and found that it does.

In Europe, Oslo and Stockholm lead musical
taste, and it's interesting to note that London, Birmingham,
Brighton, and Bristol have a much stronger follower relationship
with Oslo and Stockholm than with each other. Similarly, Cracow and
Warsaw in Poland do not follow each other, instead taking influence
from German and Scandinavian
cities.

The pair also examined relationships within
specific genres, finding that although Stockholm is very
influential in music as a whole, it's surprisingly uninfluential
when it comes to indie music. Oslo, on the other hand, kept its
high ranking in that regard, but was beaten to the most-influential
crown by Paris, which isn't especially influential when it comes to
music as a whole.

In North America, Montreal and Los Angeles
proved extremely influential when it comes to indie music, but
Atlanta, and Chicago were the most influential cities in terms of
hip-hop. Toronto managed to attain second-place rankings in
both genres, but fell below Houston, Pittsburgh and the other
aforementioned cities for music as a
whole.

The researchers also examined two more
hypotheses -- firstly that music preferences are closely related to
nationality, language and geographic location, and secondly that
large cities tend to be ahead of smaller cities. For the first,
they found evidence that this might be the case, but with a few
interesting exceptions -- most notably that New York and San
Francisco are very close, despite being separated by a continent,
Canada tends to be more similar to Australia and New Zealand than
the United States, and that French-speaking Swiss cities are more
likely to be influenced by German cities than French
ones.

As for the second hypothesis, the pair found
only very weak evidence that this might be the case. "While
these correlations between city size and leadership position are positive, most of these
relationships are quite weak," the paper reads. "We were
surprised that they were not stronger." The exception came in indie
music, which had a strong correlation between leadership and city
size. "We are not sure why this is the case," say the
researchers. "Perhaps this genre is quicker moving or more urban
than the others (although presumably hip-hop is also quite an urban
genre)."

It's worth noting, of course, that as all the data comes from
Last.fm, these results only reflect the demographic that wants to
log everything it listens to to a central database on the web.
That's going to skew the results a little, but it's not unfair to
suggest that this is probably an audience that's at the forefront
of music trends, so the conclusions drawn by the report aren't
rendered entirely invalid.

If you want to take a look at the full research paper, you can
find it over at
arXiv.

Updated15:25 19/04/2012:
Paper author Conrad Lee left a comment below to the effect that his
work isn't necessarily measuring influence, merely which cities
appear to be "ahead of the curve". He's expanded on that a little
in a blog post, where he also points out that the model isn't yet
shown to be predictive. It's worth a look to see some of the charts
from the paper blown up larger, if nothing else.

Comments

Hey, it's the author here. Thanks for the write-up, it doe a good jobs of summarizing our findings. Just a couple of comments. Although cities like Atlanta and Montreal appear to be "ahead of the curve" in adopting new music, we don't know whether they are influential. Influence is harder to measure. Also, although lastfm has received over 60 billion scrobbles in total, this work is based on only the last three years, so while it is based on billions of scrobbles it's not based on all 60 billion. You can see a few more points at my blog: http://sociograph.blogspot.com/2012/04/geographic-flow-of-music-blog-post.html